God Is In The House: Five Sacred-Jazz Recordings

Publish date: 2024-09-29

When jazz emerged in the early decades of the 20th century as music of liberation, entertainment and modernism, it provoked a backlash among cultural and religious-establishment figures, many of whom went so far as to suggest that it was "the music of the devil." By the middle years of the 20th century, however, jazz had found its way into the church, sometimes employed in the ritualistic proceedings of liturgies and other traditional ceremonies, or presented in other thematic ways that paid homage to a deity (usually Christian). How did the devil's music get religion?

The religion, in some respects, was there all along. Many African-American musicians grew up attending and performing in church services, and the imprint of that experience can be found in albums ranging from New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis' 1954 album Jazz At Vespers to saxophonist John Coltrane's landmark 1965 LP A Love Supreme, which Coltrane offered as a sort of musical prayer to God. Even Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue was inspired in part, in the words of its leader, by "some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and playing these bad gospels."

The most direct examples come from sacred-jazz compositions — pieces written explicitly to either mirror or supplement religious ceremonies. With Christmas in mind, here are five examples of jazz in the service of the Lord.